


Vc</iy>ty/tl *=A> 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



GOD'S RESCUES. 



GOD'S RESCUES; 



OR, 



THE LOST SHEEP, THE LOST COIN, 
AND THE LOST SON. 



THREE DISCOURSES 

ON 

LUKE XV. 



By WILLIAM K. WILLIAMS. 




NEW YORK : 
ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & CO., 

770 Broadway, cor. 9th Street. 
1871. 



mi 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, by 

ANSON D. F. RANDOLPH & CO., 

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 



E.O.JENKINS, ROBERT RUTTER, 

STEREOTYPER AND PRINTER, BINDER, 

20 N. WILLIAM ST., N. Y. 84 beekman street. 



I 



THE LOST SHEEP. 



Then drew near unto him all the publicans and sin- 
ners FOR TO HEAR HIM. 

And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, sating, 
This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them. 

And he spake this parable unto them, sating, 

What man of tou, having an hundred sheep, if he 
lose one of them, doth not leave the ninett and nine 
in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost 
until he find it ? 

And when he hath found it, he lateth it on his 
shoulders rejoicing. 

And when he cometh home, he calleth together his 
friends and neighbours, sating unto them, rejoice with 
me ; for i have found mt sheep which was lost. 

i sat unto tou, that likewise jot shall be in heav- 
en over one sinner that repenteth, more than over 
ninett and nine just persons, which need no repent- 
ANCE. — Luke, chap. xv. 1-7. 

IN those catacombs at Rome, where the 
early Christians sheltered themselves 
from their Pagan persecutors, one of the 
favorite portrayals is that which presents 
the Saviour in the imagery of this parable. 
A shepherd is seen bearing a lamb flung 
across his shoulders. In the pictures and 

I* (5) 



6 THE LOST SHEEP. 

coins of old Christian art, it is a frequent 
representation. One delineation, in these 
dark subterranean galleries, is supposed to 
be fifteen centuries old. It shows how, in 
days all saddened by recent bereavement 
and by impending martyrdom, the early 
confessors of the faith solaced themselves 
for the dark yesterday or darker to-mor- 
row, by remembering the self-sacrificing 
tenderness, and the infinite carefulness, and 
the untiring might, and the illimitable re- 
sources, of the great God, their Redeemer 
and their Elder Brother — " The Chief Shep- 
herd and Bishop of their souls" — as He is 
elsewhere called. That name, " Bishop," 
blends the images of the Overseer, the 
Guardian, the Rescuer, and the Avenger. 

How touchingly is it introduced in the 
narrative of the Gospel. The Pharisees 
murmured — reputable and exemplary men 
as they deemed themselves — that one, claim- 
ing to be the Messiah, should be so accessi- 
ble to the disreputable and the outcast. 
" This man receiveth sinners and eateth 



THE LOST SHEEP. 7 

with them." Their own idea of sanctity 
was, that it shunned the contact of such 
guilty and abject souls. For a John the 
Baptist, living sternly alone in the desert, 
far from the ordinary resorts and the every- 
day entanglements of society, the Pharisees 
might have some cold and distant respect. 
He might seem to them as shunning to be 
brushed by the world's ordinary throng of 
sinners, sacred in his reserve, and saintly 
in the very fact of his utter isolation. 

But that the Baptist's Master should ac- 
cept, from Zaccheus the publican, an invita- 
tion to dine beneath his roof — should enrol 
Matthew, another of that hated class, the 
tax - gatherer, the publican, among his 
Apostles ; and should even permit a woman, 
that had been once notoriously a sinner, to 
bedew His feet with her tears, and wipe off 
the fast-flowing drops with her thick tress- 
es, was in their view unbeseeming the dig- 
nity of His character and hardly to be 
reconciled with the sanctity of His mission. 

Our Lord replies, by a matchless train of 



8 THE LOST SHEEP. 

parables. The first, that of the Lost Sheep ; 
the second, that of the Lost Coin ; and the 
last, that of the Lost Son ; each bringing 
forward some new trait of anxiety for the 
souls ready to perish, and shedding, from 
some new point, another beam of hope on 
the path of the penitent. 

The first parable presents the great doc- 
trine of the Atonement, and the work of 
God the Son, as the Redeemer. It is a con- 
densation of the Epistle to the Hebrews: 
Christ shown in His sacrifice and priestly 
intercession. The second parable brings 
out the lessons of the Gospel of John — the 
work of God the Holy Spirit, who convicts 
that He may convert, and disturbs, that 
He may comfort ; like the besom sweeping 
off the dust, that has gathered in the heart 
and conscience, and upon the Bible and on 
the Book of Providence, and making all 
the soul for the time confused and discord- 
ant, and, as it may seem, even chaotic. But 
by the lamp, enlightening as well as con- 
founding ; searching out truths once dispar- 



THE LOST SHEEP. 9 

aged and neglected, and finding clues once 
utterly lost, and bringing to view treasures 
before unsuspected. So this parable brings 
out the great truths of Conversion and 
Regeneration. The last or third delinea- 
tion, presents the great truths of Effec- 
tual Calling and Adoption and Justification, 
the lessons of the Epistle to the Romans. 
These are eminently the work of God the 
Father. Thus the three graphic sketches to- 
gether blend the work of the Divine Trin- 
ity ; and bring out the Full Godhead em- 
bodied in the work of human recovery. 

As these similitudes go on, the appeal 
comes seemingly closer and closer home to 
the daily experience of His hearers, to their 
" business and bosoms." The husbandman 
hears of flocks ; the housewife of besoms 
and lamps ; and in the last parable, that of 
the returned prodigal, what an effectual 
knocking is there at the door of every hu- 
man, and especially of every parental heart. 
It is God's statement of God's regard for 
the sinner, and of the high interest that 



IO THE LOST SHEEP. 

Heaven, though stainless and happy, has, 
through all its angelic ranks, in the work 
of the Lord of Angels to recover the es- 
trayed, to win back the alienated, and to 
rescue the self-destroyed from the edge of 
the ruin to which they are rolling and 
plunging, with a fearful acceleration and 
desperate pertinacity. 

Let us dwell on the first of these illustra- 
tions, Christ, the Good Shepherd. The 
feeling, which led the Scribes to their im- 
peachment of our Lord's conduct toward 
sinners, is not yet died out. Men, who 
would scorn, as most unjust, all comparison 
of themselves with the old Pharisees, are 
yet, after the interval of so many centuries, 
repeating in our times and beside our sanc- 
tuaries, the old cavil. Are the doctrines of 
grace earnestly and freely pressed on all 
mankind? Is it said from the pulpit and 
the press, that salvation has, by the death 
of Christ, been purchased for the vilest, 
and that men may, turning from themselves 
and accepting His grace and yoke, be at 



THE LOST SHEEP. II 

once and altogether pardoned, and be per- 
fectly and forever justified ? How many 
censure this as preaching impunity to sin, 
and as bidding a perilous welcome to the 
world's veriest outcasts and reprobates. It 
is said to be a degradation of religion, and 
a wrong done to the moral and exemplary, 
to represent this as the mode of man's access 
to God ; and to paint the way to Heaven, as 
being thus, only by the Righteousness of 
Another, and by the blood of His one great 
propitiatory sacrifice. 

" Is it thus with Christ that He receiv- 
eth sinners ?" exclaim they. Or, does the 
Christian church send forth her chosen sons 
and daughters, and call for the gifts and 
prayers of her membership, to evangelize the 
degraded ; and to recognize humanity in the 
brutified, who are dwelling, perhaps, on some 
barbarian and remote coast, and in savage, 
squalid guise, tenanting some cannibal isle ? 
Is it not, even yet, too common to hear, 
against such enterprise, the cavil, and from 
some, the fierce taunt, and the flippant 



12 THE LOST SHEEP. 

sneer, at this anxiety for such remote, and 
such uncouth, and such unpromising speci- 
mens of the human family ? Why, it is 
asked, should your Christianity go so far ; 
and busy itself with such repulsive Pagan- 
ism, ignorant of the first principles of let- 
ters, and arts and laws, touching nearly the 
line of kinship to the beast ? And yet, in 
all this, does not the church of our times 
tread in the steps of that Good Shepherd, 
who went much further, and renounced 
much more ; who, leaving the ninety and 
nine, is seen to go in quest of the one es- 
trayed and perishing, dear to Him, in its 
very destitution, misery and peril? Does 
not His love need access to the misery, be- 
cause the misery so sorely needs that love ? 
So in the revelations of Modern Science, 
as to the extent of the celestial system, 
when worlds, more massive than our own, 
are seen peopling by myriads, the depths 
of space, and the mind begins to reel under 
the contemplation of the hosts of orbs, that 
God has formed, and of the intelligent 



THE LOST SHEEP. 1 3 

beings that possibly may tenant them, the 
conclusion has been drawn, Why should we 
think, that to our little paltry globe, a nar- 
row nook in the vast realm of being, and 
that to our ephemeral race, so insignificant 
and morally so unworthy of special regard 
from God, there should be sent an Incarna- 
tion of the Creator and a Revelation of the 
God who made all this teeming universe ? 
Is not this sending far, and overlooking 
much that was more worthy of notice else- 
where, for God to come down and taber- 
nacle on our planet, and in our mortal, suf- 
fering nature? Why expect the Infinite 
One to seek this tiny spangle of a globe, 
and here to visit and to receive such for- 
lorn sinners ? 

Yes — in the cavils against the doctrines of 
grace — in the pleadings against modern mis- 
sions to the heathen — in some of the popu- 
lar objections from the extent of the uni- 
verse, against the worthiness of our planet 
and of our race to receive an embassage 
from the Incarnate God — we see but the old 



14 THE LOST SHEEP. 

Pharisaic accusation, restated with some 
new phraseology. But the core of the ob- 
jection is the same. You make God stoop 
too low ; and let man, the petty, the guilty, 
and the perishable, presume on hopes that 
are preposterously too large and too lofty. 

II. See, then, how simply, and yet over- 
whelmingly, God replies. The Shepherd, 
the Incarnate Son, the Perfect Resemblance 
and Express Image of the Father, and the 
Embodiment of the Infinite Godhead, He 
puts, to the men and women about Him, an 
appeal coming home to the histories of their 
own farms and pasture grounds, to the inci- 
dents of those very homes whence they had 
just come out to listen, and to which, when 
they had heard Him through, they would be 
soon returning. Here is a shepherd, the 
owner of a flock of a hundred sheep. They 
had been feeding in the wilderness. By 
this, we suppose, intended, not a bleak, deso- 
late wild ; but a pasture, like those unfenc- 
ed commons stretching out for leagues, to 
which, in the old world, sheep are often 



THE LOST SHEEP. 1 5 

driven, like our own wide prairies of the 
West. From his flock, one sheep is missing. 
It has quitted its fellows. When they 
come to be counted at even, it is not found. 
In its defencelessness and wilfulness or wit- 
lessness, it is little likely to return ; and, if 
encountering the wolf or the lion, its fate is 
fixed. It can neither escape by fight nor by 
flight. It has gone nibbling the grass, 
bleating in its loneliness, and straying in 
its bewilderment ; and now, as the night 
gathers and the shadows deepen, whither is 
it tending, and what shall become of it? 
The shepherd stops not to reckon. He 
does not say, It is but a small proportion of 
the flock ; its course is uncertain, and who 
can tell in what direction to seek it ? I can 
well afford to lose it. As for it, it well de- 
serves its fate ; let it perish. To go in 
quest of it, were to incur certain fatigue, 
with very slender and uncertain prospects 
of any success. Why should I vex myself, 
and encounter in mountain passes, a pit, 
dark and deep, that may engulf me ; or 



l6 THE LOST SHEEP. 

some savage beast of prey, that might as- 
sail me? But, dashing aside all such pre- 
texts, the shepherd, who, in his pity cannot 
afford that the poor beast perish, leaves the 
ninety and nine in the wilderness pastures, 
and as Matthew states it, " goeth into the 
mountains/' where many a rough steep 
must be clambered, and many a precipice 
may yawn for the unguarded foot, and 
many a den may harbor its noxious ser- 
pents, or its ferocious beasts of prey. Toil, 
peril, and discomfort, are braved. The 
poor waif is found. And when found, how 
is it treated ? Is it butchered and flayed on 
the spot, and its skin borne home to be nail- 
ed on the gate of the fold, or the great barn 
door, a warning to all the rest of the flock 
of the consequences and penalties of stray- 
ing ? Is the crook broken heavily over its 
shoulder, as a punishment and a warning to 
itself though its life is spared ; a monition 
against future wanderings ? Is the hot 
branding-iron promptly applied, singeing 
the fleece, and burning down its way into 



THE LOST SHEEP. \J 

the quick, quivering flesh of the poor ani- 
mal? Or, is the watch-dog set on the poor 
silly sheep to flesh his white tooth in the 
side of the sheep, and to frighten it into a 
full, indelible remembrance of its present 
folly ? Or, does the shepherd, angry at the 
time wasted, and the labor incurred, drive 
the exhausted beast, bleeding and panting, 
and foot-sore, rapidly back along the home- 
ward way ? No. He is, however tired, wil- 
ling to be yet more fatigued, so that his 
poor charge be saved from further exhaus- 
tion, and from continued exposure to peril. 
He lays it on his shoulders, not with up- 
braiding and grudging, chiding at its folly, 
but rejoicing at the recovery. And, reach- 
ing home he summons his neighbors to con- 
gratulate him, and rejoice with him, over 
the success of his pursuit and the restora- 
tion, to its fellows and to its fold, of his es- 
trayed and imperilled charge. 

" 1 say unto you," — I, Jesus, the Son of 
the Father, ever in the Father's bosom, and 
fully in the Father's confidence ; I, Jesus, the 



1 8 THE LOST SHEEP. 

Lord of Angels, intimately acquainted with 
all their employments, and cognizant of all 
their angelic sympathies ; I, the Maker of 
your race on the earth, and of their shining 
ranks on high, the Creator also, utter it. I 
say unto you : " there is joy," in that bright, 
far, and holy heaven, among its white-robed 
and holy tenantry, over one such sinner that 
comes penitent to my teachings, and sits, 
docile and contrite at my feet, however de- 
graded his past condition and however vile 
his offences, and however forlorn his aspect 
and his prospects, there is more joy in the 
world of light over him, than over ninety 
and nine just persons, who need no repent- 
ance. Who are they ? The self-righteous, 
who suppose themselves so just as to need no 
contrition ? Elsewhere, the Saviour speaks 
of such righteousness of Scribes and Phari- 
sees ; and declares, that if His disciples do 
not attain a righteousness surpassing such 
low standard, they cannot enter heaven at 
all. Such Pharisaic excellence would move 
angels to tears rather than to songs. Who 



THE LOST SHEEP. 19 

then are the just ? We suppose the more 
proper allusion, to be to the angels, who, 
keeping their first estate, have never sinned ; 
or, if there be other beings like man, inhab- 
iting other worlds, whose Eden was never 
marred and forfeited by sin, then we are 
taught, that over their permanence in holi- 
ness, there is not the loud acclaim of joy, 
that there is over each and every conver- 
sion of a sinner from our own lost and 
doomed race. 

We sometimes wish the privilege of read- 
ing our neighbors heart. But here, open- 
ed by the hand of the Incarnate Revealer 
and Redeemer, we have a window into the 
very heart of God. We see His feelings 
of compassion towards our race and our 
own selves. He leaves the society "of the 
sinless and the angelic, and the anthems of 
seraphim and cherubim, and the commu- 
nion of heaven, for an earthly allotment of 
toil and exposure. He must traverse " dark 
mountains," when He confronts the contra- 
diction of sinners and the assaults of the 



20 THE LOST SHEEP. 

tempter, and He becomes denied of earth 
and buffetted of hell. To lift the victim of 
sin, and the heir of wrath, to His shoul- 
ders, as the recovered and ransomed one, 
that shoulder must bear the cross of shame 
and agony ; that soul of His must stoop to 
the yoke of denial, mockery and betrayal. 
He must encounter the hidings of the face 
of the Father. Weary He sits at the well 
of Samaria. But more weary, He faints 
under the weight of the cross they have 
made Him bear. More weary, hangs He, 
nailed to its wood ; the jeer, the shout, the 
blasphemy, all jangling wildly in His ears, 
as He is ready to give up the ghost, crying 
in His extremity, as the God-forsaken one, 
" Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabacthani ! My God ! 
my God ! why hast Thou forsaken me ?" 

And this Redemption is not all. He is, 
as the High Priest, now and after His ex- 
altation to the heavenly glory, still the bur- 
den bearer of His people. In His provi- 
dence, He brings them back from their im- 
penitent estrayment. " He restoreth my 



THE LOST SHEEP. 21 

soul/' said David. He bears them about, 
through all the tangled pathway of life, as 
a nurse her infant ; nor when mothers for- 
get the babe of their love, can He forget. 
He cherishes for them a vivid and lasting 
sympathy. In all their affliction, He is 
afflicted, never fails or forsakes them, to old 
age and into death ; still sustains, still cher- 
ishes, and still defends them. The High 
Priest of the Jewish Economy had the 
breast-plate, with its twelve jewels, bearing 
the names of the twelve tribes, supported 
by bands that passed over His shoulders. 
The names of Judah and Levi and their 
brethren thus lay on his heart ; whilst the 
weight of the record and the memorial was 
pressing on His shoulder. The heart, the 
seat of feeling ; the shoulders are the seat 
of strength. Affection and Power are 
shown thus, blended together in undertak- 
ing the cause, and sustaining the remem- 
brance of his people. So is it in the great 
Antitype. His shoulder of Omnipotence 
sustains, and His bosom, with its Infinite 



22 THE LOST SHEEP. 

Tenderness and unforgetting Omniscience, 
registers and defends His own Israel. 
" The Great Shepherd of the Sheep," as 
the Apostle entitles Him, has shed His 
blood not idly and ineffectually, but as the 
gory sanction, "the blood of an Everlasting 
Covenant." 

III. But why should there be more joy 
over the recovery of the fallen, than over 
the preservation of the unfallen ? We 
answer, in part, because it is here, as in hu- 
man relationship, where the mother seems 
most to love the child whose sickness has 
cost her most alarms and watchings, and 
drawn most heavily on her maternal tender- 
ness. Just as in the strifes of life, you attach 
new importance and value to the interests 
that had been threatened, to the venture 
that had been nearly wrecked, and that was, 
with effort and risk, secured again. Just as 
in the dying benediction of Jacob, he re- 
serves for his favorite Joseph a portion, es- 
pecially dear to the patriarch, which he, the 
father, had taken with his sword and his 



THE LOST SHEEP. 23 

bow out of the hand of the alien. The 
struggle had made that one of the dearest 
of Jacob's possessions. Not only was Labor 
wrought into the boon, but Valor also, and 
Endurance. Just as in your national affairs, 
Liberty and Union will acquire new pre- 
ciousness from the expenditure of treasure 
and blood required to vindicate and secure 
them, and from the taunts and insults of Old 
World despotism over your expected loss 
of these rich franchises. 

But, we suppose, that for the high joy of 
angels there is another reason. They 
might, themselves, never have been so ef- 
fectually guarded against the approach of 
sin to themselves; so thoroughly encased 
against all temptations to emulate the trea- 
son and join the revolt of their old asso- 
ciate and compeer Lucifer, had not the in- 
carnation and sacrifice of the Son shown 
the evil of sin ; had not the punishment of 
evil men and evil angels so illustrated God's 
wrath against iniquity. 

The tininess of our planet, it may be, is 



24 THE LOST SHEEP. 

not preventing it from serving as the great 
battle-field of God's moral universe. How 
oft a spot of military encounter, itself not 
larger than one of the city wards, may yet 
in our recent national struggle, have de- 
cided, by the. battle there fought, the po- 
litical destinies of the broad continent. So 
it is in God's government of our world 
and race. On our small nook of a globe, 
may yet gather and centre all the solici- 
tudes of Heaven, and all the fierce hopes 
of Hell. Good and evil may come here, 
into one long and dread death-grapple. The 
Apostle said, he was a spectacle to men 
and angels. And all the church on earth, 
widely dispersed and variously schooled, 
affords a spectacle of divine wisdom and 
faithfulness, into which angels, stooping 
down, desire to look, catching thus pro- 
founder glimpses than the Godhead, not en- 
shrouded and not incarnate, elsewhere al- 
lows them. These angels of light might 
have swerved, had not Christ's care and 
skill, in saving the saved of earth, so de- 



THE LOST SHEEP. 2$ 

veloped new wonders of Divine Truth and 
Grace, before unsuspected. 

In Christ, and in Christ's Church, the 
heavenly powers see more glorious exhibi- 
tions than elsewhere of the excellence of 
Jehovah, and every new convert is a great 
trophy, having its own new and peculiar 
memorial of the Redeemer's goodness and 
gentleness and forbearance. 

Angels rejoice, again, with an especial 
exultation at Christ's work, because of their 
full and adoring sympathy with the Lord 
of Angels and men. Now Christ rejoiced 
in spirit at the revelation of the Father to 
" babes and sucklings ;" that mere lambs, 
estrays from the flock of the Holy, should 
be made more than conquerors over him 
who goeth about as a roaring lion, seeking 
whom he may devour, was matter of exul- 
tation to Christ. He is "anointed with joy 
above His fellows," in His mediatorial , 
work. Angels sympathize with Jesus, from 
their admiring adoration of His nature and 
His career. They minister to the heirs of 
3 



26 THE LOST SHEEP. 

salvation. They did to the disembodied 
spirit of Lazarus, borne from the gate of 
Dives ; and fresh from the dunghill where 
his body grovelled, his spirit mounts, on 
their wings and under their escort, to the 
fields of light, to meet and to enhance the 
hymns of just men made perfect. 

Because of its revelation of the Divine 
Nature, because of their own surer confir- 
mation in holiness by the great drama of 
Human Redemption, and because of their 
full sympathy with Jesus, who rejoices in 
His own kingly and priestly triumph as 
head of the church, there is especial joy 
among angels over every journey of the 
Good Shepherd to rescue His lost and per- 
ishing charge. 

Now, brethren, beloved in the Lord, are 
we Christ's ? We have, in such case, His 
spirit. What joy to serve such a Master ! 
But, if imbued with His temper, we go 
forth to seek the lost. The world's moun- 
tains of error and wrong, and care and toil, 
and persecution and blasphemy, must be 



THE LOST SHEEP. 2J 

threaded. The gospel is an aggressive and 
itinerant onslaught of mercy as upon earth's 
sinners, the vile, the forlorn, the outcast, 
the barbarous. Its messengers go out into 
the highways and hedges, by the Master's 
express commission and charge. It reach- 
es the far. It grasps the self-destroyed. It 
hopes for the hopeless. It pities the piti- 
less. It weeps and prays and loves, though 
confronted by the unlovely and unloving. 

Are you a Christian, sad and ready to 
faint, because of the difficulties of the path? 
Do life's uncertainties perplex you ; and is 
the strength fast waning, and are heart and 
flesh ready to fail ? Look away to the sym- 
pathies of Jesus. Fling yourselves on the 
Shepherd and Bishop of souls. Are you 
laboring in His service, and to meet, in re- 
turn, often misrepresentation and wrong? 
Look up. It is not, on your part, going as 
far, or bearing as much, as the Master went, 
and as the Master bore, on your behalf. 
" The joy set before Him," sustained Him. 
Let its anticipation cheer and hearten you. 



28 THE LOST SHEEP. 

It is glad, and sure, and inconceivably 
near. 

Are you a sinner, living reckless of Christ, 
and His calls, and His vast claims on your 
gratitude ? Remember your exposure to 
enemies, whom you are not adequate to 
outwit and to repel. The Shepherd's quest, 
on the part of the Redeemer, goes on. You 
shun it, and you slight it. But, side by 
side, with the Redeemer's quest of souls, 
goes on the great Wolf Hunt; the World, 
the Flesh, and the Devil, in their terrible 
leash of lying, hate and desolation, sweep 
roaring by ; and you are sure, if continuing 
away from Christ, to be entangled among 
their rushing troop, and to be destroyed a 
helpless victim in their destruction that tar- 
rieth not. And with what plea, will you 
shelter your ingratitude to Christ, and your 
criminal and habitual and life-long denial 
of His right to your affection and your 
trust ? Well might the stout old sage and 
moralist of England, Samuel Johnson, burst 
into tears, as he habitually did, when recall- 



THE LOST SHEEP. 29 

ing the image of our text as given in the 
old mediaeval Judgment Hymn, in that 
verse which runs : 

" Wearily for me Thou soughtest : 
On the cross my soul Thou boughtest ; 
Lose not all for which Thou wroughtest." 



THE LOST COIN. 



Either what woman, having ten pieces of silver, if 
she lose one piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep 
the house, and seek diligently till she find it ? 

and when she hath found it, she calleth her friends 
and her neighbours together, sating, rejoice with me ; 
for i have found the piece which i had lost. 

Likewise, I sat unto tou, There is jot in the presence 

OF THE ANGELS OF GOD OVER ONE SINNER THAT REPENTETH. 

— Luke, chap. xv. 8-10. 



AMONGST the hearers of our Lord 
were those of either sex. Some were 
thus, as herdsmen and tillers, busied in the 
field, owned flocks, and drove plows ; others, 
the mothers and sisters, wives and daugh- 
ters of these, had the circle of their activ- 
ities and anxieties mainly within the nar- 
rower limits of the home. To this last 
home-keeping class speaks his next illustra- 
tion. Do the Pharisees murmur at His 
ready welcome of the sinner, lost to God, 
and lost to his fellows, and lost to himself, 
but by grace to be reclaimed ? He appeals 

(30 



32 THE LOST COIN. 

to their own modes of dealing with losses 
far more petty in character. And, by that 
quiet gradation which chains together so 
many of our Lord's sentences, He, who had 
begun with a loss in men's stables and out- 
lying sheepfolds, comes now down to a loss 
out of the purse borne about the person, 
and stowed in the girdle : as, in the next 
parable, He goes yet closer to the soul, in 
picturing a loss amongst the rarest and cost- 
liest of the heart's treasures, dearer than 
herds, dearer than revenues — a man's own 
guarded and cherished offspring. What 
Lord Bacon called a bringing home of wis- 
dom " to men's business and bosoms," was, 
in our Lord, exhibited in a simpler mode, 
but on a grander scale. Thus His parables 
travelled here, from the farmer's live-stock 
and sheepfolds to the purse borne at the 
girdle ; and then from the purse to the 
heart beating under that girdle, into the 
longing, yearning, smitten soul of a father, 
who had nourished and brought up chil- 
dren, but had hoped and waited, toiled, ac- 



THE LOST COIN. 33 

cumulated, endowed and lavished, only to 
see his bounties toward his children wasted, 
and his affection for them requited by sullen, 
base ingratitude. 

The parables of sheep and coin touched 
" business." The parable of the prodigal 
shot into the " bosom." The first illustra- 
tion brushed the skirts, the last tugged at 
the heart-strings. And so, too, He deepens 
the relative amount of the loss as He pro- 
ceeds. Of the flock, but one was missing, 
and nigh a hundred were left. Out of the 
purse had gone not a hundredth coin merely, 
leaving ninety and nine behind, but a whole 
tenth of its contents. Out of the family 
was a Joseph missing ; but were eleven 
brothers and a sister left to replace the one 
absent ? There had gone, not only a tenth 
child, leaving nine brothers and sisters to 
replace his alienation ; but the one-half of 
the branches of the household tree are 
lopped off. The homestead is half unroofed. 
It is a Jacob who has no Judah, and no 
Dan, and no Reuben, and no Simeon. He 



34 THE LOST COIN. 

has but a Joseph and a Benjamin ; and that 
youngest born, his Benjamin, is not ; for he 
had turned ingrate, and sot, and outcast, 
flung into a remote exile of his own choos- 
ing, and wrapt in a sad infamy of his own 
weaving. 

So, too, does our Lord deepen the shades 
of guilt imputed to the offender in the sin 
that has made him lost to God and rendered 
him an estray from peace and an outcast 
from hope. A sheep wanders from the 
fold : it is a fit emblem of the thoughtless 
sinner, erring through weakness and silliness 
rather than of design. A sheep may inartic- 
ulately confess and implore, when it bleats 
for compassion. But the coin dropped ; 
what power has it of guiding its own re- 
turn, of proclaiming its sense of abandon- 
ment, and of speaking out the rights of its 
real and only owner? Utterly dependent 
on that owner's care for a recovery, and it 
all turning on the will of the first finder 
whether the coin is to be embezzled or to 
be restored to its own original place and 



THE LOST COIN. 35 

proprietor, does not the dull helplessness of 
the poor piece of money well bespeak the 
desperate condition of a sinner morally 
disabled — helpless by his obduracy, who 
has neither skill, nor will, nor transient wish 
to return to God, but whom sin has bruti- 
fied and blinded into such utter insensi- 
bility, about his own danger and about 
God's wrath, that over him Sabbaths and 
Providences and Scriptures roll unnoted, 
as the)^ would over a shilling stamped into 
the mire and covered with the dust of suc- 
cessive weeks and years. And so in the 
forlorn prodigal, how has the Saviour de- 
picted the wilful and conscious sinner de- 
liberately, and persistently, and habitually 
multiplying his offences, squandering all 
his past privileges, and scorning all his 
earlier mercies. First have we the thought- 
less, and next the helpless, and lastly the 
wilful sinner ; yet, tracking the transgressor 
through all these degrees of deepened and 
indurated and desperate iniquity, God's 
mercy is seen letting itself down, past 



36 THE LOST COIN. 

thoughtlessness and helplessness and wilful- 
ness, as by the successive shelvings of the 
abyss of estrangement and peril and deprav- 
ity, into which the sinner has rolled himself. 
Does he plunge from one ledge to a deeper, 
and is the cavernous gloom of the pit grown 
more horribly dark as he descends? God 
comes down, and with an infinite com- 
passion, adorable to all eternity, is He seen 
" devising methods how His banished ones 
may return. " He is scheming that His 
lost ones may be re-installed, and how they 
may be regenerated, that they may be fit- 
tingly and be permanently re-instated in 
the renounced household and homestead. 

And as, in that great scheme of human 
recovery, the gospel of the great salvation, 
the whole of the Divine Trinity was em- 
barked, so these several parables, here in- 
terlocked, seem to allude each primarily to 
the work of one as distinguished from the 
others of the persons of the Divine Trinity. 
They present, the first, the Atoning Son ; 
and the third, the call — effectual to recall, 



THE LOST COIN. 



37 



to adopt, and to justify — the call of the 
Eternal Father ; so does this intervening- 
parable that stands midway between the 
others, and upon which our thoughts now 
fix, seem to paint the offices of the Holy 
Spirit, the Enlightener, the Disturber or 
Reprover, and the Seeker of the souls that 
lay buried in the gloom of ignorance and 
the quiet dust of worldliness, and under the 
litter and the defilement of sin. It is the 
Spirit that builds and that orders the House 
of God ; and his prerogative it especially is, 
by an effectual severing, to quarry out the 
living stones for the Heavenly Temple, to 
search out, from the ruins of the Fall, God's 
elect ones, who are, in the day of reckon- 
ing, to be counted among His jewels, and 
to be eternally treasured in His heavenly 
kingdom. And as specially answering to 
these, the Spirit's peculiar offices, as the 
type of the Divine Regeneration, following 
close on the Divine Redemption, it seems 
fitting to put that one of the three images 
used by our Lord as to man's lost estate, 
4 



38 THE LOST COIN. 

which most vividly describes man's pitiful 
and utter helplessness, in this next or sec- 
ond place. The Spirit follows the Son ; 
Pentecost succeeded Calvary. It is the im- 
age of a silver coin rolled away into ob- 
scurity, hidden in the dust and gloom. 
Amidst the bones last gnawed and splinter- 
ed by the dogs in yon corner, there lies, it 
may be, this coin beside the crusts dropped 
by the children, or under the dust and mud 
brought in from the highway. Man needs re- 
pentance. The Son of God provided for the 
bestowment of that penitence, being Him- 
self " exalted as a Saviour to give repent- 
ance and the remission of sins." The Father 
welcomes the exhibition and exercise of that 
repentance. But it is the Spirit of God who 
works the repentance itself, who inspires 
the contrite desire, and who sheds around 
the sepulchre of our spiritual death, and 
wafts down upon this moral decay, that 
light of life — that breath of heaven — which 
disperses the gloom, and arrests the corrup- 
tion, and banishes the inert silence and 



THE LOST COIN. 39 

apathy. It is the Spirit who restores to 
God's treasure-house that soul, which, at 
first, was coined in God's image, and gar- 
nered for his revenues, but which has since 
escaped, helplessly and hopelessly, from His 
service, to be trodden in the dust, and to 
be swept into the indiscriminate offscour- 
ings " whose end is to be burned," had not 
mercy thus interposed. 

We suppose, indeed, it not an untenable 
opinion, which many ancient worthies have 
held, that the Spirit is represented, especial- 
ly, as working in the Church of God ; and 
that, therefore, the laborer in the imagery 
of this parable is of that sex which is select- 
ed so often to describe in the Bible the 
Church of the Most High. " Either what 
woman having ten pieces of silver, if she 
lose one piece, doth not light a candle and 
sweep the house and seek diligently till she 
find it?" Woman is, in the family life, espe- 
cially designed of God, who orders the 
household, to be the economist. Her thrift, 
and care, and forethought may build the 



40 THE LOST COIN. 

family: as her waste and pride and sloth 
and luxury may desolate and shatter it. She 
is presented here, not as a princess whose 
bracelet has lost one pearl from its appro- 
priate setting, and who is perplexed how to 
fill up the vacant socket : or a daughter of 
Herodias, who is apparelling herself for the 
dance before the chief estates of the king- 
dom, and who finds the diamond frontlet for 
her brow to have been in some way mis- 
placed. It is a simple peasant-wife, whose 
Avhole store is but some ten silver coins, 
none large in size. One is wanting ; she be- 
lieves it, though missing, yet in the house. 
The cottage homes of Palestine, in which 
our Lord so often lodged, and in one of 
which He was reared at Nazareth, are often 
furnished only with a floor of the hard earth, 
and the chambers are often lit only by win- 
dows high up in the Avail, like the narrow 
slits and loop-holes of our barns, admitting 
but little of the outer sun-light. Indeed, 
many of the ancient homes had no light but 
by the door. On the hard, beaten earth, 



THE LOST COIN. 41 

coin or trinket once dropped may be soon 
covered among the litter, brought in b)^ the 
sandals of the traveller, or the crumbs and 
fragments flung to the dogs or the house- 
hold animals, when these are permitted to 
enter. Perhaps the little store of savings, 
the ten pieces of money, thus lessened, had 
been laid up to meet the rent-day. Per- 
haps it was the hard-won wages earned by 
some child who served in the neighbors* 
fields, and brought the scant, slow gains to 
a mother to keep, — some Ruth, who glean- 
ed after the reapers of a neighbor Boaz, or 
some Jacob who kept sheep in the wilder- 
ness pastures for some covetous Laban. 
One piece is lacking. She trusts that it has 
not yet gone from the house. If the win- 
dows give not light enough to search each 
nook, the lamp is lit. If the dust might 
conceal it, the floor shall be swept, great as 
ma)' be the cloud raised by the broom to 
overspread the apartment. And " diligent- 
ly," or repeatedly, and everywhere, and 
continually, will the owner search until she 

4* 



42 THE LOST COIN. 

finds it. So has God, by His Spirit, sent the 
Light of Revelation into the world, and es- 
pecially into the Church. So has He, in 
that Church, by the faithful preaching of 
the word, and by its dissemination as the 
written word also, beamed light into the old 
darkness and across the settled unconcern 
of society. So has He, in dealing with the 
individual soul, shot rays of searching light 
into the conscience and heart. The insen- 
sate Ahab starts at feeling that his " enemy," 
the truth, has " found him out." The un- 
believing Jew has been pierced to the soul 
in the sense of his sin and its ruinousness 
and heinousness. Lydia has had her heart 
opened to receive the truth, as the flower 
opens to the morning beams of the summer 
sun. The jailer, late so fierce and brutal, 
with a heart torn open like a rock riven by 
the earthquake, cries out in alarm : What 
shall I do to be saved ? — as he discerns his 
hideous mistakes, and shudders at the new 
light streaming in, to show his guilt and his 
hardihood, and to lay bare the nearness of 



THE LOST COIN. 43 

eternal death, of which he had been so bru- 
tishly unconscious. 

And as mere habit and neglect hide souls 
from themselves, and from the just sympa- 
thy and care of their fellows, God's Spirit 
sends its great disturbing agencies into the 
society, the nation, the age, or into the nar- 
rower bounds of the family. The besom 
does not really make the new dust ; but it 
only brings the old and long-gathering de- 
posit more, for a time, into the air and upon 
the lungs. The messengers of the Gospel 
are, for the time, regarded as " turning the 
world upside down." Or God's provi- 
dences, in calamities, and wars, and social 
revolutions, show men the magnitude of 
past hereditary errors. The besom of judg- 
ment goes shaking society out of its torpor 
and equanimity. It was so in Luther's day, 
and in Calvin's. It was so in the Puritans 
of our ancestral Britain, and in their colo- 
nists who crossed to this country. God, by 
them, broke up many a pile of quiet litter ; 
and brushed aside many a film of long-set- 



44 THE LOST COIN. 

tied green mould, picturesque in its ver- 
dure, or venerable in its grey, hoar antiqui- 
ty, which had gathered upon the national 
conscience. But a Bunyan, and a Milton, 
and a Baxter, and an Owen, and a Howe 
were precious medals brought out by the 
besoming ; and Constitutional freedom and 
National morality, and English literature, 
and Christian piety were greatly enriched 
by the agitation. It was so in the Revolu- 
tion that made us a nation. It was so in the 
agitations that went over Europe in the 
train of our first Revolution. It was so in 
our last great struggle. It has been so in 
Modern Missions. Would you put that 
shaking and besoming peremptorily and ef- 
fectually down ? We hear, behind the tur- 
moil and the thick streaming clouds of dust, 
as God's great besoms sweep along, the 
words of an august cry : " I will overturn, 
and overturn, and overturn until He, whose 
right it is to reign, shall come." That voice 
uttered the thunders of Sinai. It will not 
be safe, men of the earth, to lay your hands 



THE LOST COIN. 45 

or try your potent edicts on His dread be- 
soming. Let the potsherds of the earth 
strive with the potsherds of the earth ; but 
woe to him who contendeth with his Maker. 
God is sweeping us as a nation. The an- 
cient and dust-covered must bear the touch 
of God's rough rods when commissioned of 
Him, as they scrape and scatter and shiver. 
And how often has God used sore trials, to 
shake the unbelieving and impenitent heart 
out of its fatal security ! Your business is 
unremunerative. Your debtors fail: your 
own debts grow unmanageable. Your 
friends are sick, or far, or they grow feeble 
and unreliable. Some darling child is vis- 
ited with deadly sickness. The circle that 
once girt the table of home is broken, and a 
void place is left at the hearth and the 
board, never to be filled again by its revered 
and endeared occupant. Or, your own bod- 
ily strength fails, and your mind grows de- 
spondent and irresolute. And yet, how 
often in just such scenes of disappointment, 
bereavement and sore distress, has God 



46 THE LOST COIN. 

given you to know the true emptiness of 
earth and the indescribable excellence of 
Christ and his salvation. He has whirled — 
rudely, fiercely, you think — away, all the 
old peace and ease. But He is only besom- 
ing the habitation to recover the jewel. He 
is filling the old familiar scenes with a whirl- 
wind of cares and frettings and anxieties, 
to show thee in this brief, sharp way, the 
brightness of a better hope than earth ever 
bred, and to let in the undying light of 
Grace and Redemption on thy faint, dark 
soul, and on the death-bed and the grave 
and the far Eternity which lie before thee. 

God, in His enlightening and His dis- 
turbing agencies, is bidding the people and 
His churches, to seek out, and is Himself, 
drawing out lost souls. These times of agi- 
tation may become seasons of great moral 
renovation. The church should, in her 
own bounds, look for the lost — the neglect- 
ed — the overlooked — the estrayed — the dis- 
regarded, and the down - trodden. Her 
Lord's jewels may be amongst these sweep- 



THE LOST COIN. 47 

ings. So Carey, and Fuller, and Ryland, 
and Sutcliffe, looked over seas and conti- 
nents to the Bengalee sweepings in the In- 
dian chambers of the wide imperial domin- 
ions of Britain, What spoils for Heaven — 
what new gems for the Saviour's mediato- 
rial crown, did they not find, rewarding the 
search. So Judson, and Boardman, and 
Vinton, labored for the Burman and Karen. 
And so, at home, the Sabbath-school Teach- 
er, and the Tract Visitor, and the Home 
Missionary, may find, and should seek dili- 
gently and prayerfully until they do find, 
the lost, that are their Master's, in the 
wide wastes of the neglect and squalor and 
ignorance and destitution of our great cities. 
So may battle-fields and hospitals and mov- 
ing armies, have going through them, the 
quest of Christian sympathy, and Christian 
labor, and Christian prayer, and Christian 
generosity, and Christian brotherhood, and 
Christian patriotism. Who shall calculate 
the gains thus secured to Christs' cause ? 
The Spirit convinces of sin. His first 



48 THE LOST COIN. 

lessons are of necessity, then, humiliating, 
alarming and arousing. He leads the poor, 
burdened pilgrim by the quaking mountain 
of Sinai, under the canopy of its gloom and 
thunderings, and over the miry depths of 
the Slough of Despond. Men feel them- 
selves strangely conscious of a misery and 
guilt and weakness, which before they had 
never suspected as belonging to them. 
They go from side to side, in pursuit of a 
vain relief, and meet only disappointment 
and rebuffs. But as the light shines from 
the Strait Gate and the Atoning Cross, they 
begin to hope, and believe, and love, and 
repent. They fall at the feet of the Redeem- 
er, whom they have so long forgotten or 
spurned. They find under the strong, 
steady light of Scripture, as expounded and 
made intense by the Spirit, that Saviour in 
His glorious fullness. In finding Him, they 
find themselves ; and their own souls thus 
saved — souls, that, if found at death out of 
Christ, would have had their redemption 
ceasing forever — are in Him, become re- 



THE LOST COIN. 49 

splendent centres, each in its own orbit, of a 
glory never to be clouded, and fountains of 
a peace unspeakable and eternal. Out of 
the dust and the darkness comes the gem 
imperishable. 

And what shall be the result of all the 
toil and the turmoil to the laborious search- 
er for souls, and the successful ? Fatigue, 
repining and sad exhaustion ? No — the 
neighbors are made sharers of the joy, al- 
though not called to partake the search. 
The grace won in the closet, streams free 
over the mart and the highway. True 
piety is the love of the God of Love ; and 
rejoices in the transmission of its own image 
and feelings to others. The number of fel- 
low-heirs diminishes not, in religion, the 
share of each kinsman in the common heri- 
tage. The more, the richer. Each angel 
is the happier on this very day, for this 
day's conversions of sinners on the earth to 
God ; though it be but some ignorant child, 
groping its way to the feet of Jesus, some 
poor outcast, feeling on his soiled brow and 
S 



50 THE LOST COIN. 

shrivelled heart, the first beams of Christ 
as the Morning Star ; some sufferer, turn- 
ing, amid sorrow and death, the eye of a 
new-born hope and a new-found peace to- 
wards a Blessed Redeemer and an opened 
Paradise. If, in the presence of Christ's 
Pharisaic opponents, who watched for occa- 
casion of complaint, there was a pang of 
envy and disappointment at his reception 
of the poor, penitent publicans, that feel- 
ing of discontent did not pervade the bosom 
of the unseen, angelic attendants of our 
Lord. " He was seen of angels," as they 
watched His earthly pathway ; and angels, 
as they now survey the course of His 
Church, rejoice in each sinner repenting, 
though his be dying breath, drawn like that 
of the penitent thief, on the cross where he 
hangs in mortal anguish. 

What then is the lesson of all this ? Are 
men to do nothing ? Are they to wait pas- 
sively the Spirit's approach ? No, my Chris- 
tian brother. The Spirit is freely given to 
your asking. No, my unbelieving friend, it 



THE LOST COIN. 5 I 

is your fault, to be continually resisting and 
grieving that Spirit. It has solicited you in 
every time of sober thoughtfulness. You 
have gazed on the starry heavens, and felt the 
paltriness of earth's trifles. You have looked 
over the ocean, and in view of its depths 
or its storms, felt the feebleness of man and 
the majesty of man's Maker. You have 
stood by the bed-side of a dying Christian, 
and have heard the appeal bidding you to 
seek God. In the sanctuary, your lethargy 
has been disturbed ; God has sent truth to 
hunt and harass you. In all these scenes 
and seasons, the still, small voice of the Spirit 
has been calling you to seek God ; and love 
has been calling you to know Christ, and 
thus be at peace. 

Nor let the church forget the terrible 
dangers of a false peace and a carnal se- 
curity. It is not the crying " Peace, Peace," 
that brings it to State or to Church, when 
there is not the putting away of sin, and 
the doing of justice, when there is no 
" peace," of equity — of truth — and of 



52 THE LOST COIN. 

brotherhood. God threatens those who 
" settle," like Moab, in mere apathy and 
worldliness, " on their lees/' and mistake 
sloth and luxury for the repose of innocence 
and blessedness. He warns His people of 
the slow accretions of scandals, and errors 
and judgments, when the strong man armed 
keepeth his house in peace — when excluded 
light, and gathered dust, have festooned the 
habitation for the abode of Lukewarmness 
and Indolence, of Apathy and Spiritual 
Death. How terrible is the warning of 
God, by His prophet, Malachi, to a degen- 
erate Israel. They allowed, so to speak, 
the litter of their heartlessness and formal- 
ism to gather around their religious assem- 
blies, and over their devout services. Then 
the priest and the people became, as repro- 
bate silver, fit for the fate of the refuse into 
which they had fallen. The besom of judg- 
ment was about to gather, and to hurl 
forth, such from the courts and privileges 
which they had profaned. " If you will 
not hear," saith the Lord, " I will curse 



THE LOST COIN. 53 

your blessings : yea, I have cursed them al- 
ready, because ye do not lay it to heart. 
Behold, I will spread dung upon your faces, 
even the dung of )^our solemn feasts, and 
one shall take you away with it."* The 
Roman legions, and the fire-brands of Titus, 
flung in at temple windows, to set ablaze 
the temple hangings, were God's rude 
scavengers to sweep, from the land and 
courts of God, formalism and worldliness ; 
as a band of sweepers goes in after some 
great gathering, to remove the mire which 
the multitude had brought in, by their 
trampling feet, and the accumulated frag- 
ments and offal of their turbulent convoca- 
tion. 

When the Jews were about to keep the 
Passover, the feast of unleavened bread, 
they searched the whole house with candles 
to cleanse it from the last vestige of ordinary 
bread which had leaven in it. Paul uses this 
as an illustration of the Christian Church, 
as needing to purge themselves anxiously 

* Malachi, ii. 2, 3. 

5* 



54 THE LOST COIN. 

for revival, and thus they might be ready to 
receive a blessing from God. But if the 
gospel searches and scatters and disturbs, 
it comes also to sift and to recover. It 
elevates multitudes, who were before igno- 
rant and careless and depraved, and makes 
them to sit in heavenly places in Christ 
Jesus. It takes the soul, a coin stamped 
for its Maker, in His own image, with His 
superscription. That coin has been trodden 
on and encrusted, until it is black and un- 
sightly. It lies in the ashes — it is swept 
into the dust-bin. But He, who has " no 
pleasure in the death" and banishment of 
the sinner, brings it forth. He says over 
His people : " Though ye have lain among 
the pots,* yet ye shall be as the wings of a 
dove covered with silver and her feathers 
with yellow gold." The grovelling shall 
soar and the lethargic become aspiring and 
exultant. The dimness shall be burnished. 
Human nature shall be made sterling by 
the alchemy of Divine Grace. Man shall 

*Psalm, lxviii. 13. 



THE LOST COIN. 55 

be rendered the mate of angels. The 
earthly Church shall become the ante- 
chamber of the heavenly. What lay, with 
Lazarus, among dogs, shall, with Lazarus, 
disenthralled and disembodied, rise to the 
society of seraphim, and the presence and 
smile of the Lord our God, in the fullness 
of His glory and the clear beamings of His 
love, seen at His own home, where is full- 
ness of joy, and w r here are pleasures forever 
more. God smites, but it is to heal you ; 
He disturbs you, but it is to give ultimate 
calm and peace. He searches you out, 
buried and dark in your low estate : it is to 
lift you to His own diadem, to shine as His 
jewels with a cloudless, endless splendor. 

And the Church of God needs in her own 
home and house to be busy, grieving not 
the Spirit, but earnest in keeping the light 
burning clearly, and vigilant that she may 
prevent the dust from settling, in passive 
quiet, on her inner furniture. To remain 
by the past is, in a world of loss and change, 
not the sufficient safeguard of religious life 



56 THE LOST COIN. 

and religious usefulness. The dust of for- 
malism, and lethargy, and worldliness, may 
soon bury up all her treasures of grace and 
truth, as far as these consist in Christian ex- 
ample. The discipline, that for the time 
agitates, may be the first and inevitable con- 
dition precedent, for the life and growth that 
is promised to her prayers and her efforts. 

The Church has, in her own bounds, scope 
for large work. All that is needed is but to 
set about it, in God's sight and strength, in 
the love of souls, and in the entreaty for, 
and the expectation of, aid from His good 
Spirit. 

It is work, in which the very stars of 
heaven, and the angels that always behold 
the face of our Father in heaven, will work 
with, and will work energetically and heart- 
ily for, her. Arise and shine, then, Church 
of God! Shake thyself from the dust, and 
put on thy beautiful garments, and become 
the praise of the earth and the joy of thy 
Lord. 

Times of change and commotion, and 



THE LOST COIN. $? 

great social upheaval, and darkenings that 
cloud the whole horizon, need bring no sad 
and chill forebodings. Seek Christ, and 
seek the increase of Christ's Church ; seek 
diligently the souls of the perishing. Hang 
out the lamp, and scan the omens of duty 
and hope ; ply patiently and cheerily thy 
task in thy own special field — in thy nook 
of sorrow and toil. Above all, pray with- 
out ceasing ; and thou shalt not look in 
vain, or find thy toil bootless or thy prayer 
unheeded, The promise for the enquirer, 
is made to diligent effort and patient, per- 
sistent research. The miner does not ex- 
pect to wash gold dust into his coffers, with 
the first stroke of his pick, and the first 
waving of his sieve. He must turn the 
flood, stand deep in its current for weary 
days, and lift pick, and urge spade, till the 
arm aches and the heart wearies ; but, so 
and thus only, comes success. It is so, God 
has said, in heavenly things, " If thou shalt 
search for wisdom as for hid treasures, thou 
shalt find her." 



58 THE LOST COIN. 

Let not the burdened soul, distracted 
with cares, to whom the outlook on life is 
dark and tempestuous, who feels God's 
Providence tearing into the old rest and 
scattering roughly and suddenly, the old 
confidences, therefore give way to despair. 
It is even thus that God is righting His 
own house and making the walls of His 
cause and His Zion to be built in troublous 
times. 

And what is the joy of the regenerate 
soul, in prospect of these changes, even 
whilst yet prisoned in the body and sur- 
rounded with the conflicts and trials and 
besetments of earth, if but the grace of God 
shines in the soul. How can it, then, adopt 
the words of Charles Wesley, the hymn- 
writer of our Methodist brethren — 

" Long my imprisoned spirit lay, 

Fast bound in sin and nature's night ; 

Thine eye diffused a quickening ray — 
I woke — the dungeon flamed with light : 

I rose, went forth, and followed Thee." 

The soul lost is found again. The creature, 



THE LOST COIN. 59 

wandering and diving and plunging hell- 
ward, is saved; and now journeying in the 
care and under the conduct of God, it is 
climbing, and, one day, to be soaring heav- 
enward. And if householders are glad over 
their augmented stores and their increasing 
home comforts, as the fields grow broader, 
and the harvests richer, and the revenues 
ampler, and the ten pieces become thou- 
sands and tens of thousands — what greater 
joy is his, who is rich toward God, whom 
God has made useful in winning immortal 
souls to the knowledge and service of 
Christ Jesus. The mother, the Sabbath- 
school teacher, the father, the pastor, the 
missionary, thus honored, are, indeed, blest in 
having turned any or many, or brought but 
the individual, or won the multitude from the 
error of their ways. God grant that each of 
us may be thus rich, as said Paul, though 
ourselves poor, " yet making many rich/' 
What the joy of a father and a Christian 
mother, greeting a whole household given 
to their prayers, and safely housed at last 



60 THE LOST COIN. 

in the upper skies. The waving sieve, the 
tossing besom, the shadowing cross, all will, 
in that world of light, be remembered with 
a fervid gratitude. 

" I will search Jerusalem with candles," 
says our God by Zephaniah.* Blessed 
those ready for the Divine scrutiny. " I 
will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver," 
is His declaration elsewhere, f Thrice 
blessed those whom He, the Great Refiner, 
shall stamp as His truly, and own as His 
eternally. May each of us, my hearers, 
thus blessed in the search, and even under 
and by the refining, be found shining, at 
the last, as the sun forever in the kingdom 
of the Father, to Whom — with the Son, the 
Redeemer — and the Spirit, the Renewer, the 
Sealer, Sanctifier and Comforter, be glory 
evermore. Amen. 

* Zephaniah, i. 12. f Malachi, iii. 3. 



THE LOST SON. 



And he said, A certain man had two sons : 

And the tottnger of them said to his father, Father, give 
me the portion of goods that falleth to me. and he di- 
vided unto them his living. 

And not many days after, the younger son gathered all 
together, and took his journey into a far country, and 
there wasted his substance with riotous living. 

And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine 
in that land; and he began to be in want. 

And he went and joined himself to a citizen of that 
country ; and he sent him into his fields to feed swine. 

And he would fain have filled his belly with the husks 
that the swine did eat i and no man gave unto him. 

And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired 
servants of my father have bread enough, and to spare, 
and i perish with hunger ! 

i will arise and go to my farher, and will say unto him 
Father, I have sinned against Heaven, and before thee, 

And am no more worthy to be called thy son : make me as 
one of thy hired servants. 

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was 
yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compas- 
sion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. 

And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against 
Heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be 
called thy son. 

But the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best 
robe, and put it on him ; and put a ring on his hand, and 
shoes on his feet.* 

And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it ; and let 
us eat, and be merry i 

For this my son was dead, and is alive again ; he was lost, 
and is found. And they began to be merry. 

no^ his elder son was in the field: and as he came and 
drew nigh to the house, he heard music and dancing. 

6 (61) 



62 THE LOST SON. 



And he called one of the servants, and asked what these 
things meant. 

And he said unto him, Thy brother is come ; and thy fa- 
ther HATH KILLED THE FATTED CALF, BECAUSE HE HATH RECEIVED 

him safe and sound. 

And he was angry, and would not go in : therefore came 
his father out, and entreated him. 

And he answering, said to his father, Lo, these many years 
do i serve thee, neither transgressed i at any time thy 
commandment ; and yet thou never gave st me a kid, that i 
might make merry with my friends : 

But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devour- 
ed THY LIVING WITH HARLOTS, THOU HAST KILLED FOR HIM THE 

fatted calf. 

And he said unto him, Son, thou art ever with me, and all 
that i have is thine. 

it was meet that we should make merry, and be glad i 
for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again ; and was 
lost, and is found. —Luke, chap. XV. 11-32. 



IS it not disparaging to compare man to 
a prodigal, insensate and impoverished 
and imbruted? The debasement was of 
man's own making. God is but stooping to 
uplift us from that degradation ; and to en- 
trench and environ us upon the heights of 
His recovered favor, and amid the securi- 
ties of His avowed Fatherhood. 

All may have noticed the startling ap- 
pearance of reality, — the distinctness of out- 
line, the body with its shadows standing 
forth until it seems it could almost be touch- 



THE LOST SON. 63 

ed, — which distinguishes the stereoscopic 
view of some landmark or monument from 
the ordinary picture. It arises from the in- 
strument's furnishing two different views 
taken at two different points ; but made in 
the after survey both to blend into one. It 
is, by seeming to see it from two sides and 
under two aspects, that we feel the apparent 
wholeness and roundness and reality, of the 
scene or the structure to be represented. 

Is it not part of the crowning glory of 
Revelation that it gives us a more impres- 
sive and vivid representation of truths and 
duties and sins, by its giving us the two- 
fold aspect of many a scene and character 
which the ordinary literature of the race 
can see and can limn only on one side? 
The Bible stereoscopes great facts of hu- 
man experience. Where the history, the 
philosophy, or the poetry, of merely earthly 
origin can afford us but only the one side 
of an incident or character, and draws 
thus but a dead and flat sketch, God's in- 
spired messengers present us the two as- 



64 THE LOST SON. 

pects — the side that man surveys, and the 
side that angels and God behold. Thus de- 
picted, the portraiture catches an inimitable 
reality and prominence. When the woman 
that had been a sinner stole her trembling 
way, uninvited and unheralded, into the 
house of Simon to wipe the feet of his Di- 
vine Guest, it seemed on the human side, as 
the host and his friends regarded it, the 
unwarranted intrusion of a disreputable 
stranger giving very questionable honors 
that compromised and tarnished the Re- 
ceiver. As the angels of God beheld it, 
there was a penitent renouncing sin, and 
absolved of the God whose pardon can re- 
mit the offence as His grace can renew the 
offender. 

When the dwarfish Zaccheus climbed the 
tree, to gaze over the heads of a wonder- 
loving and tumultuous throng at the illus- 
trious Prophet of Nazareth, it seemed to 
neighbors, and it may be to apostles, only 
the curiosity of one whose interest in Christ 
was likely to do himself little good, and to 



THE LOST SON. 65 

do the Master little service, belonging, as 
the eager gazer did, to a class generally, 
and not without reason, disliked of the Jew- 
ish people, — the tax-gatherers, not very 
scrupulous as to means of levying, and not 
very exact and honest as to amounts report- 
ed at the treasury, of a tax laid by heathen 
conquerors upon the proud and chafed and 
bigoted Hebrew people. But to the Mas- 
ter's own eyes, it was salvation coming 
home, that day and in that wild gathering, 
to the house and the heart of Zaccheus ; it 
was another trophy snatched for Heaven ; 
another channel hewn for the gospel's free 
currents over the world. What a new view 
of life might we have if we would but, be- 
side the world's view and hasty superficial 
sketch of it, take out of Scripture the juster 
and far different view and judgment of it as 
it appears unto Him who seeth not as man 
seeth — if we would let the Bible stereoscope, 
so to speak, all our estimates of character 
and duty, of trial and temptation, by casting 
them before us under the twofold light, as 
6* 



66 THE LOST SON. 

man sees and as angels see them. How- 
would trifles shrink from the world's exag- 
geration of their size, and grow pale and 
dim, spite of the world's elaborate painting 
of them with tinsel and borrowed hues, if 
we would but let in upon them the light of 
another world, and the strong glare of the 
judgment day. So did Moses turn from the 
splendors of a flattering, and from the ter- 
rors of a menacing, court, and find all dead- 
ened down in tone and dwarfed into insig- 
nificance as to size, under the calm and aw- 
ful light of a higher sovereignty and an 
eternal recompense. He endured, as seeing 
Him who is invisible ; and feared not the 
wrath of the king. So martyrs, threatened 
with death, but solicited by the proffer of a 
resurrection from the peril of a yawning 
tomb, if they would only consent to sin, if 
they would simply offer incense — a pinch 
of it — to an idol, rise superior to intimida- 
tion and blind to allurement, by looking to 
a better resurrection — aye — a far better than 
the world could promise — even the escape 



THE LOST SON. 67 

of the soul to God and the recovery of the 
tortured and mangled body, in the day of 
the opened grave and the opened dooms- 
day book, then to be a deathless and pain- 
less and glorious body, a glorified taberna- 
cle, ever the home of a sanctified and im- 
mortal and untempted spirit. 

So our Saviour, in those parables of which 
we now would scan the third and last, meets 
the cavils of His enemies against His kind- 
ness towards publicans and sinners, by bring- 
ing in, — upon the partial and limited view 
which His accusers had of the Saviour and 
His penitent listeners — the light in which 
angels and the God of angels looked upon 
these same lost ones, whom these Pharisees 
so denounced, and upon the penitence and 
recovery, which these Pharisees deemed so 
questionable as to sincerity, and which they 
judged, if sincere, so certainly and so utter- 
ly insignificant as to influence. When the 
lights of earth on the one side, and the lights 
of heaven on the other side, fall thus on one 
and the same incident or character, what a 



68 THE LOST SON. 

new reality does it put on. We are verita- 
bly and really — each one of us — not what 
we judge ourselves, or as we seem to our 
erring fellow man — fallible and precipitate 
— partial in his over-friendliness, it may be, 
or prejudiced in his animosity. But we are 
intrinsically and really as we seem to the 
eyes of another order of beings — to holy 
angels and the God of angels. We are 
what Christ the judge sees us as being — 
nothing more, nothing less. An English 
statesman spoke of merely titular nobility 
as u the accident of an accident." Beings 
of a higher world regard man as the crea- 
ture and the charge of God, the denizen of 
eternity. To them, the true sorrow for sin, 
and the consequent welcome of the Redeem- 
er, displayed in the case of earth's vilest 
rebel, and lowliest and least intelligent 
transgressor, are causes of joy. The morn- 
ing stars, who shouted over our earth's 
creation as over a new exhibition of their 
Maker's glory, do, this very Sabbath, won- 
der, and blaze, and warble out new ecstasies 



THE LOST SON. 69 

of adoration, as they see the greater achieve- 
ments of the Redeemer and the Renewer, in 
the conversion of but one sinner from the 
error of his ways. Why not you, that con- 
verted one : the receiver, yourself of a free 
pardon ; the theme, yourself, of a celestial 
anthem ? To us, the victor's palm, and the 
capitalist's revenues, and the poet's laurel, 
and the crown of empire, show like realities. 
To them, the realities are God's smile, or 
God's ban — heaven or hell — souls in their 
apostacy — souls in their recovery — souls in 
their communion with God — or souls self- 
banished from God to an irremediable sin 
and an unreturning exile. Let us implore 
from God's Spirit aid aright to ponder, on 
God's pages, the lessons of this new light, 
bringing into solemn prominence and sa- 
lient distinctness, the facts of our desti- 
ny and our interest — our danger for both 
worlds, and our duty for all time and for all 
eternity. 

I. As to the order and connection, then, 
of the three parables, does it not seem as if 



70 THE LOST SON. 

they were intended — the Lost Sheep, the 
Lost Coin, and the Lost Son — to present the 
great scheme and fact of human salvation 
as it lies in the Divine Mind ? Consistently 
with Divine Equity and with the faithful- 
ness of the holy law which man has broken, 
God cannot be the Father of a lost race un- 
til His Divine Law, which man has tram- 
pled under foot, be magnified and made 
honorable. He must be "Just" — just to 
Himself — just to His angels — just to the 
unfallen tenantry of other worlds before He 
can be "the Justifies" of him, the peni- 
tent and returning prodigal, who believes 
in Jesus. The Redemption precedes the 
Renovation. 

The Shepherd seeking his estrayed sheep, 
must be reminding us of the Divine Speak- 
er of the parable, when elsewhere He de- 
nominates Himself, the Good Shepherd lay- 
ing down His life for the sheep. Does not 
this first parable bring forward that atoning 
sacrifice of the Son, provided in Heaven, 
and demanded by the Law and the Nature 



THE LOST SON. 7 1 

of God, as the prerequisite for man's recov- 
ery and forgiveness? 

Then, on this redemption go forth, in the 
second parable, the Providence of God, and 
the Spirit of God, and the Revelation of 
God, as the lamp and besom and the dili- 
gent search of the housewife, recovering 
the lost coin ; and bringing and enabling the 
soul of man, to see the danger of its condi- 
tion by sin, and its need of the gracious 
provisions of the Great Atonement. But, 
whilst man is dependent on God's Spirit for 
each good thought, he is not saved in inert 
carelessness, and in utter apathy and inac- 
tion. He is turned of God ; but he turns 
himself, when thus turned of the Good 
Spirit. If quickened, he is converted ; and 
repents and considers his ways, and sets his 
face toward a forsaken home and an out- 
raged Father. Then comes to the soul thus 
seeking and self- destroyed, the thought : 
Will God receive, and can the Holy ac- 
cept so worthless a petitioner? And to the 
soul of man, thus awakened and humbled. 



>]2 THE LOST SON. 

distressed in its self-accusations, and per- 
plexed as to its possible disenthralment, 
how does this closing parable of the three 
address its consolations. You are unwor- 
thy, but you are the sought and the wel- 
comed of a most loving and generous and 
placable Father. You cannot so yearn to 
return, as He longs to welcome your re- 
turn. 

II. Let us dwell next on the affecting 
picture of man's apostacy, and of man's 
return, and of God's acceptance, and of 
man's mistakings and mislikings as to that 
acceptance. 

It is a tender and opulent parent. His 
sons, housed and trained under his eye, 
have not requited aright the father's love 
and bounty. The younger cries, Give me 
" my portion that falleth to me." Was 
it his right that he asks it thus ? Till 
the father died, was there any " falling to 
him ?" Had the parent needed the rough 
hint, that he had lived too long, and now 
lagged a supernumerary and incumbrance 



THE LOST SON. 73 

on life's stage ? The father, even to a plea 
so rude and unfilial, yet responds. It is — 
alas — ttiQ- daily, hourly appeal of man to his 
Maker. We want our share, as we think 
it, of earth and happiness, away from 
God ; and in some imaginary but impossi- 
ble independence of Him. You have your 
own scheme of happiness ; and, though 
God's creature, stalking over His earth, 
and inhaling with each new respiration, 
His air — the eye seeing by His light, and 
the ear hearing by the vibration of His 
atmosphere, upon your bodily organs of 
His wise framing; — each returning Spring, 
with its starting buds and shooting grasses, 
with its fields again green, and its skies 
again blue, but a new loan from his unstint- 
ed, untiring, unconstrained generosity ; — a 
loan, not a debt from Him — all that you 
have, all that you are, and all that you hope, 
but His handiwork and His loan, you seem 
to suppose it must be " given" you, as if to 
enjoy it for yourself, apart from the Author 
of it all. Why is this? By what right 
7 



74 THE LOST SON. 

make you such a claim on God ? By what 
shadow of reason, can you defend the feasi- 
bleness of a happiness apart from Him? 
But be this as it will. It is given. God 
allows you the use of your liberty though 
it be misimproved, to your own injury and 
His dishonor. The portion is gathered, to 
be carried afar from and to be enjoyed out 
of the sight of its parental Earner and Be- 
stower. Follow the young adventurer to his 
far land. He is now shaken loose of the old 
restraints ; and hurls off the old fetters of a 
father's lessons and Sabbath training, and 
wipes away all a mother's prayerful tears 
and nursery traditions. The old family Bi- 
ble shall not pester him. Sabbaths shall not 
hamper his free, proud movements. Now, 
for the swing of the free passions ; for gaiety 
and license and self-will. But, along with 
the new riot of an imaginary and willful 
freedom, the happiness does not come. 
Strangers aid the prodigal, by interested 
flatteries, to wing his treasures, and seize 
his long-coveted goal of self-indulgence and 



THE LOST SON. 75 

earthliness. The reveller, in his cups ; the 
skeptic, in his cavillings ; gets loose of 
God's curbs of conscience and scripture 
and early training. But somehow, the por- 
tion of time and means and strength allotted 
the reveller, is fast spent. The life fleets 
by — the powers now flag and fail, and the 
shadows fall and the amusements grow vap- 
id. The wine has run to lees ; the varnish 
and paint scale off the gaudy scenes of the 
world's glittering drama. Like the dying 
Chesterfield, he complains that he has been 
behind the scenes, and has seen the dirty 
pulleys and daubed canvas of the world's 
paltry spectacles. He is disenchanted. But, 
in the failure of his old illusions, the prodi- 
gal is far from God ; but not nearer thereby 
to any true friend, or true home, in the 
land of his exile. Suddenly he finds that 
he is poor and in want. But his want is 
obstinate and his poverty is proud. He 
will not gratify the old instructors of his 
childhood by owning a mistake. Not He. 
He will not ask a Father's pity or forgive- 



j6 THE LOST SON. 

ness. He will rather keep his complaints 
from a father's knowledge, and seek the ser- 
vice of strangers ; as he has coveted happi- 
ness in the society and boon companion- 
ship of aliens. But, instead of sympathy, 
he finds the shrugged shoulder, and the dis- 
tant bow, and the unrecognizing stare. 
When he appeals for help, he is sent to me- 
nial work and a starving stipend. He must 
go into the fields to feed swine ; he yearns 
for their food ; and, seeing his hungry 
glances, and wan cheeks, his step that has 
lost its elasticity, and his cowed air, none 
of his old mates, who had drained the 
veins of his prosperity, like the hungry 
leech, choose to waste a thought,, or turn 
aside from their new revels and new dupes, 
to bestow a tear on the poor unthrifty out- 
cast, whom they had aided to beggar, and 
whom they now combine to disavow. The 
old story — is it not — of the world's large 
welcome of the prosperous, and quick de- 
sertion of the wretched ? Plaudits for the 
man of the full purse, if its strings are held 



THE LOST SOX. 77 

but loosely tied ; and sharp criticisms and 
speed}' disavowal of the man whose purse 
had been rapidly emptied or cunningly 
stolen. You go to the world for happiness. 
Long as you can seem to give it to the 
world, they will live on you. But you be- 
come discontented and sad ; and then the 
world ships you off to her Botany Bay of 
the foiled and the baffled and the disap- 
pointed. In his sorrow, the prodigal comes 
to himself. His superiority to his father's 
grave lessons, and his impatience of the re- 
straints of the home, and his preference for 
the far land and the wild revel ; all were, as 
he now sees, not merely follies but sins, the 
sheerest blunders and the saddest insults 
and wrongs. How many hired servants of 
his father — men who had less religious 
knowledge than himself, are now, in true 
peace, far superior to him. Men who were 
idolators and cannibals, in the time of his 
being a Sabbath - school child, are now, 
thanks to God's grace, true Christian wor- 
shippers ; and he is a sad, forlorn, hopeless, 

7* 



78 THE LOST SON. 

wanderer. The estrangement from God, 
and escape from the Sanctuary and Sabbath- 
of his youthful training, had not left him as 
happy, even as much so as less favored men 
in endowment, in privilege, in station, the 
mere servants of his ancestral household. 
They have enough. He is in pinching want. 
And, coming to himself, he will no longer 
stay by himself. He who had trusted in 
self and the world — who had said to the 
Father: " Give me mine, ,, and had said to 
the strangers: "Help me spend what is 
mine," now will turn his back on his fatal 
choice and his recent associates. How his 
father may treat his confessions is doubtful. 
But they are due to justice and to truth ; 
and he will make the attempt. He comes 
in shame, and in rags. But he is descried 
afar. Does his father send one of his low- 
est retainers, to warn off the bounds of the 
estate the prodigal, who had so disgraced 
his house and kin ? Is he bidden to forbear 
poisoning with his leprous rags, the air of 
the mansion of which he was so unworthy ? 



THE LOST SON. 79 

No, he is descried, to be pitied. The fa- 
ther does not excuse himself for inaction ; 
but runs to meet and welcome him. His 
confessions are broken off by his father's 
frank forgiveness. That father runs to 
meet his child when yet "a great way off ;" 
and falling on his neck, embraces him. 
The child would have fallen at the parent's 
feet. The father forbids it, and clasps his 
son's neck. He bids bring out the best 
robe, and slay and dress the stalled calf; he 
puts the shoes on those bared feet lately so 
bemired, and the ring on the brown hands 
of the poor forlorn penitent ; and the feast 
begins, without waiting the return of the 
brother, as yet busied in some distant por- 
tion of the estate. That brother is startled 
on his homeward way at the sights and 
sounds of some strange rejoicing. He 
will not rush in, well assured though he 
might be, that his wise and good father 
could have no such festival days without 
some good cause — without some new felici- 
ty, that he, like his father, should at once 



80 THE LOST SON. 

exult over. He beckons a servant to be his 
informant. Instead of sharing and helping 
the fathers generous welcome, and adding 
a brother's greeting and a brother's tears to 
the glad return of the exile and the attesta- 
tions of paternal tenderness, he is discon- 
tented and will not enter. The father 
comes out. Insulting his parent, this un- 
natural and envious man, speaks of the joy 
as unjust to himself. The return he talks 
of, not as a return home, but as a " coming," 
as if it were unwarranted, and should, of 
right, have been barred and disallowed — a 
mere visit, meant to sponge afresh on a lib- 
erality already abused and a tenderness that 
had been vilely dishonored. He speaks of 
the new comer as " thy son," not recogniz- 
ing that he was as really " my brother." 
He recalls not the prodigal's sorrows and 
his amendment and his humiliation, but his 
sins only ; and he paints, in envy and in 
self-esteem, his own comparative merits. 
He had no paltry kid, though he would 
have used it with respectable friends — men 



THE LOST SON. 8 1 

all in good repute, orderly and cosy and 
moral tax - payers. This outcast had the 
fatted calf, though his past waste had been 
with " harlots." But the father responds 
by the touching remark. Was the elder 
brother's stay with himself, a mere separa- 
tion from all " friends?" Was he, the father, 
then no " friend" of the elder son? Had 
he not, in the father's presence, and in the 
father's society, all things as " his own ?" 
Did the feast and the welcome really confer 
— if he were but right-minded — more pleas- 
ure on his parent, than they ought to have 
done on himself — a son and a brother? 
Had not the younger child, of the same 
hearth-stone and roof-tree, been dead ; was 
he not alive again ? Had he not been lost ; 
was he not found? Was it natural, manly, 
filial, fraternal, thus to scowl on Redemp- 
tion from Hell : and make his growlings of 
selfish envy the under-base of the melodi- 
ous anthems of glad angels over a new res- 
cue from Abaddon and a new trophy for 
Heaven? 



82 THE LOST SON. 

III. And now, let us see the application 
of this most simple and yet profound of 
parables. How did it show the Pharisees, 
tenderly, yet keenly, the unworthiness of 
their discontent at the conversion of sin- 
ners. What right had they, as true sons 
and as true brothers, to remain thus strange 
to the joys of the loving and the Holy 
Jehovah, and have thus no response, no ear, 
no tolerance for the anthems and gratula- 
tions of all His holy and heavenly worship- 
pers, over the conversion and recovery of 
the estrayed and the self- destroyed, now 
brought happily and forever back ? When 
the Pharisees heard of the ninety and nine 
sheep that had not wandered, the ninety 
and nine just men needing no repentance, 
how readily they appropriated the character 
as their own. When they listened to the par- 
able of the lost coin, how they congratulated 
themselves, as bright medals that had never 
rolled from the meshes of the Law T 's purse, 
and never stooped to the sinner's low plane 
of contamination, tumbled and mired up- 



THE LOST SON. 83 

on the soil. But when the prodigal was 
painted in his excess, how did their self- 
righteousness take new honors to itself, in 
the thought of their own lofty escape from 
all such prodigal vanities and vagabond ex- 
cesses and disreputable intemperance ! But 
when came, at last, the elder brother's irrev- 
erence to the father, and unnatural harsh- 
ness to his misguided junior, all this jars 
unpleasantly on them. It was a mirror, 
that showed them, so faithfully and yet so 
delicately, their own stolid selfishness, and 
their sullen alienation from God's delight 
over the recovery of the lost, and from 
God's joy in the redemption of the self-de- 
stroyed. 

You look at the Ragged School, with its 
noise and unseemly sights and unfragrant 
steams, You hear of the misery and vice, 
it may be, of parents and homes from which 
these children have come. You read of 
cannibals, devouring their missionary guests. 
It is hard, is it not, but is it not also blessed, 
to bring in the other aspect, and the stereo- 



84 THE LOST SON. 

scopic view, of angels exultant over light 
shed into earth's dark nooks, and over souls 
snatched out of the miry clay of earth's fetid 
pools, to shine ultimately in the Redeemer's 
diadem ? 

Let each say to himself: Thou, my soul, 
art the prodigal. Like him, hast thou wan- 
dered far ; and, like him, hast thou wasted 
much ; and, like him, hast thou sunk low. 
Even thus, hast not thou wandered from the 
innocence of childhood, and from the high 
aspirations of thy ingenuous youth, to earth- 
liness and selfishness — from God's law, to 
thy own mad will? Hast thou not wasted 
much ? not merely of property, for frivolous 
and unworthy objects and for idlest self-in- 
dulgence, but of that, which is more valuable 
than riches, influence and talent and oppor-, 
tunity — the warnings of conscience and the 
teachings of the sanctuary and the lessons 
of the Spirit ? Hast thou not sunk low ? 
Exalted above the beast and bird in intelli- 
gence, in the possession of conscience and 
in the anticipations of eternity, hast thou 



THE LOST SOX. 85 

not too often been the inferior of these less 
highly endowed creatures, less true to thy 
God than these are to their own narrower 
instincts ? The ox knoweth his owner and 
the ass his master's crib ; but Israel, reared 
on miracles, and pampered with divine 
revelations — Israel knoweth not its Feeder, 
its Master, its untiring, ungrudging Bene- 
factor. Is not this a degradation, stolid- 
ity, and brutality — more than animal, lower 
than mere brutishness ? But, ingratitude to 
an Incarnate Redeemer, what can be so 
monstrous as this ? 

But gazing through the parables, and 
across the sufferings of our Lord and 
Saviour, into the heart of God thus laid 
bare, what cause of adoring gratitude and 
wonder have we in the pledged readiness of 
God to meet and to pardon the self-accusing, 
self-destroyed sinner ! The new and over- 
whelming view of our folly and demerit ; 
the juster sense than was ever before attain- 
ed of our own provocations, of the bright- 
ness of the Divine Holiness, of the excellent 
8 



86 THE LOST SON. 

righteousness of the Divine Law, and of the 
glory of the salvation long spurned, seems 
now to make our offences hopeless of for- 
giveness. But look up, through the mist 
and storm of self-reproach to the Father, 
as these parables paint Him, and see, in the 
errand of the Ransoming Son, and of the 
Convincing, Converting Spirit, the incred- 
ible and surpassing goodness of the Father. 
Ready is the Fatherhood of God, waiting 
even now, and waiting for thee, the sinner, 
in thy past follies, in all thy sad requital of 
His tenderness and bounty. Cast not away 
the salutary humiliations and warnings. 
Put not from thee the parental invitations, 
and the fraternal entreaties of thy Saviour 
and God. Low as may have been thy grov- 
elling, and great and lavish as has been thy 
wasting, and far as has been thy wandering, 
all Heaven adjures thee to turn, and waits, 
intently, thy acceptance of the gracious 
overture. Turn and live. Retrace the 
steps of estrangement, and renounce the 
ways of folly and sin. If man, thy brother. 



THE LOST SON. 87 

distrust thee, do not thou distrust the Com- 
mon Father. Let the scowl of the Pharisee 
be, for thee, drowned in the beaming, trans- 
forming smile of thy Father in Heaven. 
Christ, thine Elder Brother — not like him of 
the parable, an accuser against thee, but an 
Advocate for thee — welcomes thee with an 
eager generosity, and pursues thy distrust- 
ful estrangement with bounty the most 
lavish, and invitations most cordial and en- 
dearing, and adjurations most solemn and 
importunate. Wisdom wrote for thee the 
scriptures, and indited for thee the parable, 
and urges on thy heart the promises. 

How needful, amid the trials of this 
earthly life, and how blessed is it to look 
off from the low plane and past the near 
horizon of Earth and Time, to the higher, 
wider Heavens, with their juster standards, 
and clearer lights, and unsetting glories, 
that thus we may learn to judge aright of 
the events around us, and of the influences 
that are passing over us. Earthly trial, 
however sharp and however long, is not 



88 THE LOST SON. 

hopeless, or endless, or even aimless, if ac- 
cepted as the appointment of a parental 
Providence, and as training and meetening 
us for rest in Jesus. And earthly splendors 
and lures grow tame and despicable, when, 
from the side-lights of scripture, we learn 
to acknowledge what baits they often are 
and what fates they often work out. Who 
would envy the pomp and girding flatterers 
of Herod, as the worm is seen already com- 
missioned to smite the deified orator ? Who 
would yearn to change lots with the daugh- 
ter of Herodias, in her grace and her 
princely home, when the prophet's head is 
seen as the price of her fascinations, and the 
ghastly trophy of youth, beauty and rank? 
Who would adopt, and iterate as their own, 
the wail of Jacob or of the afflicted Job 
over all things as against them, whilst see- 
ing, in scripture, "the end of the Lord " 
in the trials thus deplored and despaired 
over? 

Blessed, indeed, is his lot, however ob- 
scure and unfriendly as to man it may seem, 



THE LOST SON. 89 

over whom, regenerate, loving and grateful, 
is heard the Father's assurance : All things 
are yours. All things shall work together 
for thy good. Nothing shall be able to 
separate thee from the love of God which 
is in Christ Jesus. The earth, with all its 
adornments, treasures and privileges, may 
well be dear, as thy Father's work, and as 
one of the outlying fields to His heavenly 
home. But in addition to a share of His 
bounties here, there awaits thee a better 
portion hereafter and in the world beyond 
this. If even now, in those fields of light 
and peace, there is joy over one penitent 
yet trembling and tempted and imperfect 
on the earth, what, as w r e may well believe, 
shall not be the mounting stages of a higher 
exultation over a human spirit fully enfran- 
chised and finally glorified ? What must 
be the greetings of the Church beyond the 
judgment-day — the gratulations of the Zion 
of God all complete in number and rich in 
the mature and symmetrical grace that has 
culminated in eternal glory. Beside the 
8* 



90 THE LOST SON. 

River of Life, before the throne, beneath the 
splendors of the celestial and endless Sabbath 
in that city of God, whose residents go out 
no more for ever. To such a rest the prodi- 
gals of earth are bidden to aspire — the be- 
liever is destined assuredly to ascend. The 
sinners of this dark world, forlorn, self-im- 
poverished, self-banished, are called to look 
up from their remote exile, from the heaps 
of unsatisfying husks littered around them, 
to this upper scene of victory and gladness 
and cloudless light — the true " Father's 
house of many mansions/' "■ A threefold 
cord," said the wise man, "is not easily 
broken." And when our days here are sad 
and few, how blessed the touch, in faith, of 
the cords of deliverance and pardon, of 
hope and rescue, flung down into the dun- 
geon from the throne of the Triune Je- 
hovah. The Redeeming Son of God — 
the Renewing, Illumining and Recovering 
Spirit — and the Adopting and Forgiving 
and Justifying Father have braided its 
strands, that shall never part under any 



THE LOST SOX. 9 1 

stress ; and which pledge a hope that maketh 
not ashamed. Believe in God, and live for- 
evermore. Know thy Maker ; seek the eye, 
and sink in filial trust on the heart of thy 
Father on high. Once restored to His 
favor, and at peace with Him, and then 
shalt thou that be at peace with thyself; 
and His wide universe shall, finally, be at 
peace with thee, all things, loyally or per- 
force, working together for the good of 
them that love God and who are the called 
according to His calling. 



NOTE. 

In these Discourses, the three Parables of our Lord 
are regarded as presenting the work of the Son, of the 
Spirit, and of the Father, in setting up " the kingdom 
of God." It is the establishment of that kingdom in 
the convert's heart ; singly, and apart from his fellow- 
men. 

The Apostolic Benediction, used so generally for all 
centuries since Christ's ascension, refers to that king- 
dom on another side, and not so much in a solitary 
worshipper, but as seen in the collective body of con- 
verts. It is a prayer to each person of the Divine 
Trinity for the maintenance and expansion of that 
sway of Christ over the nations, by means of Christ's 
churches. " The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and 
the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, 
be with you all. Amen."* Here, too, as in the para- 
bles, the work of the Atoner stands first ; but the parental 
love of the Divine Father now follows in the second 
place, and to the third place is assigned the energy of 
the Divine Spirit, as maintaining the unity and bro- 
therhood of the Church, cementing and assimilating 
the body of Christ ; and rendering it aggressive and 
victorious in its influence over the world, by a power 
of transmutation and assimilation shed forth upon 
them. The reign, or " kingdom of God " is, in the 
lonely disciple, a recovery to God, the enlistment of a 

* 2 Corinthians xiii. 14. 
(9*) 



NOTE. * 93 

solitary recruit. In the assembly of Christ's disciples, 
that u kingdom " becomes a camp of such recruits, dis- 
ciplined and summoned to aid in recovering all others 
within their reach. The spirit of restored fellowship 
or u communion " with God is, in its own bounds, a 
pledge of higher, closer fraternity with all fellow-citi- 
zens, enhancing their accord and " communion." And 
it is as much also a spirit of loving compassion for 
those yet estrayed and prodigal, and as yet beyond its 
bounds, endeavoring to bring over the sharers of a 
common revolt into the fellowship of a common hope 
in Christ and into full heirship in a paradise which the 
Elder Brother has opened for converts out of all lands 
and all kindreds. The Spirit of God, taking by Christ's 
appointment the place of Witness on the removal of 
Christ's human and visible body from the earth, stands 
last, when the Apostle is describing the hopes and 
duties of the earthly church collectively. The great 
Agency, magnified in the scenes of Pentecost, is to be 
invoked and to be relied upon by the people of God for 
the expected glories of the Millennium. That the Second 
Adam may rally and restore the race which the First 
Adam betrayed and divided, the Paraclete must be 
sought, as the principle of life and the bond of union 
and the giver of conquest. 

But, in the baptismal form pronounced over each in- 
dividual convert, and enunciated afresh in each new 
admission to the earthly church, the names of the 
Divine Trinity appear in another order. In the mys- 
terious economy of the Divine Nature, the Son, as the 
sent of the Father, and the Spirit, as sent forth of the 
Father and the Son, take the second and third place, 
and the Father's is the first. 



94 * NOTE. 

If these views be just, the form of the titles of the 
Godhead used in baptism presents God as He is, abso- 
lutely and apart from the work of man's salvation. It 
is the King's titles, as He proclaims them and His sub- 
jects avouch them. The parables, in this chapter of 
the evangelist Luke, present that same Divine Nature, 
as manifested for the restoration of man, the banished 
and lost, in the experience of the individual soul. With- 
out the shedding of blood, no remission of sins — and 
the Shepherd laying down life for the sheep ; without 
the new birth or regeneration, no capacity for the favor 
of God — and the Almighty Spirit brooding over the 
moral chaos for a new creation ; and the Fatherly love 
of God, first devising that atonement and providing 
that regeneration, and then applying such device and 
such provision to accomplish the adoption and restora- 
tion of the self-banished prodigal. An Effectual Call- 
ing based on a prerequisite Propitiation and a prece- 
dent or coincident Renewal. And the Apostolical Bene- 
diction, sounded in so many tongues of the earth and 
through so many centuries, over such myriads on my- 
riads of assembled Christians, reminds the whole sacra- 
mental host in whose name it is that they set up 
their banners ; and bids them ever, in their plans and 
supplications, to remember that, as they are bought in 
One Blood, and are the called of One Father, they need 
to receive, and cherish, and implore One Spirit. By 
Him shall ultimately all earth's discords be hushed. 
To u grieve " that Spirit of Holiness and Love, is to 
rend Christ's mystic body. To u quench " that Spirit 
of Light, Truth and Life, is to instal Falsehood in the 
chair of Verity, to bequeath despair to the world, and 
to work suicide as against the Church. 



NOTE. 95 

The Trinity is not, then, in the Bible a mere specu- 
lative mystery, too recondite to be practical. As a doc- 
trine, each disciple avouches it on the church threshold. 
As an experience, it underlies the conversion of the 
individual. As a life, it pervades the collective churches 
through all lands and all ages. It is at once, badge, 
history and banner. A badge, in baptism ; a history, 
as to the ransom, regeneration, and filial adoption of 
each separate disciple ; and a banner, as to the array 
and prospects of Christ's collected disciples, moving- 
forward as churches to subdue the world to the obe- 
dience of the faith. The Zion of God welcomes each 
neophyte into her fellowship under this Triune Name, 
and speeds forth each dispersing assembly that quits 
her courts, with the same significant invocation. She 
greets the coming, she bids farewell to the parting 
guest, in the name of the Trinity. 



& 



V ' 



